It's hard to wrap one's brain around the scale of this thing, but ... I sure wouldn't want to be anywhere within a few light-years of that thing when it blew!
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Supernova 2015F...
It's hard to wrap one's brain around the scale of this thing, but ... I sure wouldn't want to be anywhere within a few light-years of that thing when it blew!
Curioser and Curiosity...
A walk though the morning's political headlines...
A walk though the morning's political headlines ... neither inclines me to be proud of my country's political process, nor to be more engaged in it:
Trump calls Cruz a “pussy” Classy, isn't he?
Hillary to shake up her campaign staff Her poor showing can't be her fault!
Bloomberg eying a run for President Because we need another old white guy!
Jeb! would eliminate Citizens United Because conservatives hate free speech!
Sheesh...
Trump calls Cruz a “pussy” Classy, isn't he?
Hillary to shake up her campaign staff Her poor showing can't be her fault!
Bloomberg eying a run for President Because we need another old white guy!
Jeb! would eliminate Citizens United Because conservatives hate free speech!
Sheesh...
Artur Fischer, RIP...
Artur Fischer, RIP... You have almost certainly used some of this man's 1,000+ inventions. I've used many of them. He died on January 27th, at his home in Germany, at the age of 96...
I did a lot of work on things like this...
I did a lot of work on things like this ... back in the early 2000s, when I worked for an electronic stock and options company. “Algorithmic trading” was just coming into its own back then, and some companies were making a lot of money with some relatively simple algorithms. For instance, “pairs trading” was a common strategy. The notion behind it was very simple: by examining historical stock pricing data, someone would identify a pair of stocks where the price on one of the pair (call it "AAA") change before the price on the other (call it "BBB") changed, and in a predictable way. In that case, you could write a program that watched the price of "AAA", and automatically bought or sold "BBB" on the assumption that it's price would change sometime later.
We built a pairs trading platform, and sold it as a service to hedge fund traders. It didn't take us long to observe a problem: soon after someone started using a particular pair of stocks, the correlation between the pair's prices would decline and disappear. Why? With some investigation, it was obvious: other people would soon start using the same pair, and after that, the market erased any benefit (when lots of people see such a correlation, the price automatically gets adjusted by market forces to eliminate the benefit – it gets “priced into” the trailing stock). How did these other people know to trade in the pair? That's also easy: with a simple algorithm like pairs trading, you can figure it out from the trades that someone makes – and those trades are public information.
So our CEO decided that what we needed was an algorithmic trading platform that used an algorithm so complex that nobody could reverse-engineer it. Personally, I thought that was crazy – with all the trading data available, it seemed really unlikely that such an algorithm existed. I thought a more sustainable route was an algorithmic trading platform that depended on something more reliable: that computers are always going to be faster than humans. We had a series of contentious management meetings on the subject, with the result that we sent off to build that complex algorithm platform. Shortly afterwards I was laid off. I have no idea if my skepticism was even part of why I was laid off.
I note with some belated satisfaction, however, that the high-speed trading is in fact the way the industry has gone – albeit with far more fanaticism than I'd ever have thought. For instance, there are now point-to-point radio links in place between traders and the markets in New York (and similarly in other parts of the world). These links exploit the tiny advantage in the speed of electronic communications that a straight-line route has over the traditional wired route. That tiny advantage justifies many millions of dollars in cost to set up those radio links. Amazing!
We built a pairs trading platform, and sold it as a service to hedge fund traders. It didn't take us long to observe a problem: soon after someone started using a particular pair of stocks, the correlation between the pair's prices would decline and disappear. Why? With some investigation, it was obvious: other people would soon start using the same pair, and after that, the market erased any benefit (when lots of people see such a correlation, the price automatically gets adjusted by market forces to eliminate the benefit – it gets “priced into” the trailing stock). How did these other people know to trade in the pair? That's also easy: with a simple algorithm like pairs trading, you can figure it out from the trades that someone makes – and those trades are public information.
So our CEO decided that what we needed was an algorithmic trading platform that used an algorithm so complex that nobody could reverse-engineer it. Personally, I thought that was crazy – with all the trading data available, it seemed really unlikely that such an algorithm existed. I thought a more sustainable route was an algorithmic trading platform that depended on something more reliable: that computers are always going to be faster than humans. We had a series of contentious management meetings on the subject, with the result that we sent off to build that complex algorithm platform. Shortly afterwards I was laid off. I have no idea if my skepticism was even part of why I was laid off.
I note with some belated satisfaction, however, that the high-speed trading is in fact the way the industry has gone – albeit with far more fanaticism than I'd ever have thought. For instance, there are now point-to-point radio links in place between traders and the markets in New York (and similarly in other parts of the world). These links exploit the tiny advantage in the speed of electronic communications that a straight-line route has over the traditional wired route. That tiny advantage justifies many millions of dollars in cost to set up those radio links. Amazing!
You may have seen this story...
You may have seen this story... A hacker published (on Sunday) the names and other information about 20,000 FBI agents. When I first read the very superficial and (of course!) breathless news reports, I had two immediate questions:
The second question is answered by this article. Assuming that information is accurate and complete (and I feel foolish even considering that, given it's sourced by a news organization), the information was obtained by good old-fashioned Kevin Mitnick-style “social engineering”. The hacker tricked someone into giving him access to a classified account. No special technical knowledge required. This is very often the case – the very best, most perfectly maintained security technology can easily be bypassed if a hacker can trick an authorized user into letting him in.
Not long ago I read a version of this social engineering that involved something else altogether: a way to steal valuable cars. It seems a gang of car thieves realized that customers of a restaurant with valet service were voluntarily handing the keys of their cars to the valets. So they paid the real valets at a fancy Boston restaurant to take a night off – and they paid them very well. Then the car thieves too the place of the real valets, and parked customer's cars for about an hour. Then they simply drove off with the eight most valuable customer's cars, using the keys that the customers handed them. At the time the news story I read was written, they had not been caught.
Often the social engineering approaches that succeed at hacking into things like those FBI records are just as plausible as that car example. Most of the time, if you poke into the details, you'll come away thinking “That could have happened to me!” It doesn't take particularly stupid or foolish people to be tricked...
- Are there really 20,000 FBI agents? That seems like an awfully big number.
- Did the hacker get this information by exploiting technology vulnerabilities, or some other way?
The second question is answered by this article. Assuming that information is accurate and complete (and I feel foolish even considering that, given it's sourced by a news organization), the information was obtained by good old-fashioned Kevin Mitnick-style “social engineering”. The hacker tricked someone into giving him access to a classified account. No special technical knowledge required. This is very often the case – the very best, most perfectly maintained security technology can easily be bypassed if a hacker can trick an authorized user into letting him in.
Not long ago I read a version of this social engineering that involved something else altogether: a way to steal valuable cars. It seems a gang of car thieves realized that customers of a restaurant with valet service were voluntarily handing the keys of their cars to the valets. So they paid the real valets at a fancy Boston restaurant to take a night off – and they paid them very well. Then the car thieves too the place of the real valets, and parked customer's cars for about an hour. Then they simply drove off with the eight most valuable customer's cars, using the keys that the customers handed them. At the time the news story I read was written, they had not been caught.
Often the social engineering approaches that succeed at hacking into things like those FBI records are just as plausible as that car example. Most of the time, if you poke into the details, you'll come away thinking “That could have happened to me!” It doesn't take particularly stupid or foolish people to be tricked...
Well, this is encouraging...
Well, this is encouraging... Note, though, that it's not happening inside our school system...
That moment...
I'd often wondered why nearly all of these slippers had that decorative shoelace in front. So far as I could tell, the only thing it was good for was entertaining cats (and that it was very good for!). But this time I got to looking closely at that shoelace, and noticed that it wrapped all the way around the opening for my foot. Somehow in all these years I'd never noticed that. I thought it was just sewn into the front top of the slipper, a useless decoration.
So I tried an experiment: I yanked hard on those laces and ... it made the foot opening smaller. In fact, with just a little trial-and-error I was able to adjust the opening to precisely the right size to keep the slipper both comfortable and secure.
Dang.
I could have done that on the 30 or so other pairs of slippers I've owned. And I never knew it...
Now we'll see if I can remember this little lesson :)
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